DVD region code

• 1. Introduction

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  DVD region codes arrived in 1997, and the instant they did, they divided the world into zones. Buy a disc in Tokyo and try to play it in Toronto, and the player refuses. Buy one in London and bring it to Los Angeles, and the same thing happens. The system is invisible to most people until the moment it isn't, and then it feels like an arbitrary wall between a buyer and a product they paid for.

  The technology behind that wall is called a digital rights management technique. Rights holders use it to control not just where a DVD can be played, but when it can be played and at what price. A film might land on shelves in the United Kingdom months before it opens in theaters in the United States, as happened with the film 28 Days Later. Without region coding, a determined viewer could simply import the disc.

  The story of region codes is not just a technical footnote. It touches on competition law in Australia and Europe, censorship in North America, and the strange fate of travelers who simply wanted to bring home a souvenir. And it did not stay confined to DVDs. It followed the format into Blu-ray discs and the PlayStation Portable, each time taking a slightly different shape.

• 2. Eight Zones, One World

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  Region 1 covers the United States, Canada, and Bermuda. Region 2 sweeps across Europe, much of the Middle East, Japan, and several African nations including South Africa, Eswatini, and Lesotho. Region 3 takes in Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Region 4 handles Latin America, Australia, and most of the Caribbean. Region 5 stretches across Africa, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Central Asia, South Asia, Mongolia, and North Korea. Region 6 is Mainland China alone. Region 7 is reserved for MPA-related discs and media copies of pre-releases in Asia. Region 8 applies to international venues: aircraft, cruise ships, and spacecraft.

  The boundaries are not always intuitive. North Korea and South Korea, sharing a peninsula, sit in different regions: North Korea in region 5, South Korea in region 3. Mainland China uses region 6, while Hong Kong and Macau, geographically embedded within China, use region 3. The Baltic states present their own case. They previously sat in region 5 because of their history as part of the USSR, but European Union single-market law on the free movement of goods pushed them into region 2.

  A disc does not have to carry only one code. A DVD labeled Region 2/4 plays in Europe, Latin America, Oceania, and any other Region 2 or Region 4 territory. Most DVDs sold in Mexico and the rest of Latin America carry both region 1 and 4 codes. Some made after 2006 are region 1 alone, aligning with Blu-ray region A. India takes yet another approach: most DVDs there combine region 2, region 4, and region 5 codes, or are region 0 entirely.

• 3. Why the System Exists

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  Staggered release dates are older than DVDs. Before digital cinema made simultaneous worldwide releases practical, a print of a film for public exhibition was expensive to manufacture, and a large number of prints was needed only for a narrow window immediately after release. Spreading release dates across territories allowed some prints to be reused in other regions rather than scrapped.

  Copyright ownership adds another layer. The rights to a title can be held by different entities in different countries. A studio holding rights in one territory has no obligation to let another region's disc generate royalties that flow elsewhere. Region coding gives those rights holders a tool to keep their territory's market to themselves.

  Price is part of the calculation too. Discs in some markets are sold more cheaply than in others, and without region coding, consumers could simply import the cheaper version. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission noted as much in a December 2000 report, warning that DVD players enforcing region coding might violate the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. The Commission stated plainly that the restrictions are artificially imposed by a group of multinational film entertainment companies and are not caused by differences in television formats.

  Censorship is a quieter purpose that critics have pointed out. The Region 1 DVD of the 1999 drama Eyes Wide Shut contains digital manipulations that allowed the film to secure an MPAA R-rating. Those manipulations do not appear on discs from other regions.

• 4. Loopholes and Countermeasures

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  Region-free players reached the market not long after region coding was introduced. Some are shipped from the factory without the ability to enforce regional lockout. Others can be unlocked by entering a code via the remote control, changing the factory-set configuration flag to another region or to the special region 0. Many websites make these codes publicly available, commonly described as hacks.

  Studios tried to close that gap with a scheme called Regional Coding Enhancement, also known as RCE or REA. An RCE disc contained the main film as a region 1 title, but also embedded a short video loop showing a world map of the regions, coded as regions 2 through 6. When played in a non-region-1 player, the player defaulted to its native region and found only the map loop, with user controls disabled, making escape impossible.

  The scheme had a critical flaw. A region-free player cycles through regions until it finds one that works, using the last region that succeeded with the previous disc. RCE could be defeated by briefly playing a standard region 1 disc, then swapping in the RCE-protected disc, which would now play without incident. RCE also created problems for some genuine region 1 players, which was not the intended outcome.

  Computer DVD drives introduced their own version of the standoff. Older drives used RPC-1 firmware, which imposed no regional restrictions. Newer drives use RPC-2 firmware, which enforces region coding at the hardware level. Users are allowed to change the region code up to five times in most drives. If those allowances run out, the last-used region becomes permanent, even if the drive is moved to a different computer. That limit is built into the firmware, though it can be reset with software tools or by reflashing the drive with RPC-1 firmware.

• 5. PAL, NTSC, and Television Standards

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  DVD region codes operate alongside a separate layer of regional formatting tied to television broadcast standards. DVDs are formatted for two distinct systems: 480i at 60 Hz, associated with NTSC, and 576i at 50 Hz, associated with PAL and SECAM. The terms come from analog television but continue to be used for DVD purposes to identify refresh rates and vertical resolution.

  NTSC is historically associated with the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Taiwan, and several other countries. PAL covers most of Europe, most of Africa, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and North Korea, among others. Brazil adopted PAL-M, a variant that uses the refresh rate and resolution associated with NTSC. SECAM, linked to French-speaking Europe, shares PAL's resolution and refresh rate but uses a different color encoding system.

  Consumers in PAL and SECAM countries generally have an easier time than those in NTSC countries when it comes to cross-format playback. Almost all DVD players sold in PAL and SECAM markets can play both kinds of discs, and most modern PAL televisions can handle the converted signal. Someone in an NTSC country who wants to watch a PAL disc typically needs both a region-free, multi-standard player and a multi-standard television, or a converter box. Pixel aspect ratio and frame rate add further complexity: NTSC discs are 720 by 480 pixels at roughly 29.97 frames per second, while PAL discs are 720 by 576 pixels at 25 frames per second.

  Blu-ray players, which support up to 1080p signals, are backward compatible with both NTSC and PAL DVDs, sidestepping some of those complications for users who have upgraded.

• 6. Blu-ray and What Came After

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  Blu-ray simplified the DVD map considerably, reducing eight regions to three. Region A takes in the Americas, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Region B covers Africa, West Asia, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and their dependencies. Region C handles Central Asia, China, Mongolia, South Asia, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova.

  The enforcement mechanism differs from DVD. On Blu-ray, region codes are verified only by the player software, not by the computer system or the physical drive. That makes the region counter easier to reset with hacks targeting the software layer rather than the hardware. Standalone Blu-ray players enforce region coding through firmware.

  A newer layer of Blu-ray region control goes beyond the three-letter regional zones by adding country codes. Both the United States and Japan sit in region A, but an American disc may refuse to play on a device installed in Japan because the two countries carry different country codes. The United States holds 21843 in decimal, or 5553 in hexadecimal, which spells "US" in ASCII under ISO 3166-1. Japan holds 19024 in decimal, or 4a50 in hexadecimal, spelling "JP". Canada's code is 17217, or 4341, spelling "CA". This country-code layer allows more precise distribution control than the DVD system's eight regions ever permitted.

  At the top of the format ladder, Ultra HD Blu-ray discs are region-free by default, encoded as worldwide releases. The PlayStation Portable's UMD format followed a DVD-like structure with six regional zones, though many PSP games carried no regional restriction at all. Sale of region-coded DVDs is outright illegal in New Zealand, and as of March 2001 the European Commission was investigating whether the price discrimination created by region coding violates European competition law.